In this month’s Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff writes about a woman named Michelle Lyons, who witnessed two hundred and seventy-eight executions in Texas, first as a prison reporter for the Huntsville Item, and then as a public-relations representative for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. At first, Lyons was unbothered by the task—she believed that the death penalty was sometimes necessary, and she felt that she was filling an important role by making the executions a matter of public record. But over the years the job began to wear on her. At times, she kept a diary, recording observations and feelings that weren’t conveyed in her original reports. Her story reveals the moral implications and the psychological toll of the death penalty—even on the law-enforcement personnel who implement it.

“The Aftershocks,” by David Wolman, for Matter, tells the strange story of an ongoing legal case in Italy, where seven scientists have been convicted of manslaughter for the deaths caused by a 2009 earthquake in the town of L’Aquila.* The scientists were part of a commission charged with communicating a realistic assessment of the area’s earthquake risk after an amateur seismologist caused panic by making predictions using a device of his own invention. Wolman’s account, like the case itself, goes deep into the complicated business of communicating scientific knowledge to the general public. Scientists will mean one thing when they say that an earthquake is “unlikely,” but laypeople will often come away with a very different understanding of the danger at hand. “Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers,” Wolman writes, but cases like the L’Aquila earthquake show that “we are even worse with words.”

Words, and the relative value we assign to them, are at the heart of this piece inThe Atlantic, by Adrienne LaFrance, about a man named Paul Moran, who lived near John Updike for many years and went through the author’s trash on a regular basis, gathering memorabilia. His collection, which he calls “the other John Updike archive,” contains hundreds of letters, pictures, and other ephemera, many of which are quite personal. Updike’s official archivists dismiss Moran’s collection as historically unimportant and accuse him of a gross invasion of privacy. Moran argues that artists often don’t know the importance of what they discard, and that his trash gathering was legal (it was) and even noble. LaFrance uses Moran’s story to consider the degree to which artists can control their legacies.

At the MTV Video Music Awards last weekend, Beyoncé’s performance of a medley of all the songs from her latest album occasioned widespread fawning, viral GIFs, and a renewed storm of speculation about the state of her marriage to Jay Z. So this is as good a time as any to revisit Nico Muhly’s exhaustive, raucous review of Beyoncé’s album, published shortly after it was released, in December of 2013. Muhly, whom Rebecca Mead profiled for The New Yorker in 2008, is a musical prodigy who made his name writing operas, but he proves to have a flair for writing in this piece, which includes song-by-song commentary that is equal parts incisive, weird, and hilarious.

*Correction, September 5th: An earlier version of this post implied incorrectly that all seven of the convicted scientists are seismologists.